‘Westworld’ Season 2 Trailer Sets the Humans and Hosts on a Collision Course

At long last, today we got a look at what the second season of HBO’s anticipated, secretive second season of Westworld is going to be. As you can imagine, it involves a lot of cryptic conversations between park co-creator Arnold (Jeffrey Wright) and revolutionary android Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood).

When last we left our ragtag group of cowboy LARP-ers, Dolores had organized something of an uprising among the park’s “hosts” — androids programmed to act out role-playing fantasies for the paying guests — and Maeve (Thandie Newton) was roaming free and discovering that there are other “worlds” within the giant theme park.

Also returning are cast members James Marsden, Ed Harris, Jimmi Simpson, Tessa Thompson, and Rodrigo Santoro.

Set to a heavy strings arrangement of Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” (a fine companion to all those player-piano Radiohead tunes we got through season 1), the trailer promises a reckoning, with the hosts preparing to fight for their lives as the Westworld corporate team and security look to squash their rebellion. Maeve, meanwhile, en route to finding her missing daughter, looks like she might be in the business of liberating other parks, like Shogun World, for example. There’s talk of revenge, of “it’s us or them,” of burning the whole place to the ground. In other words, this is a trailer that promises big action. We’ll see starting April 22nd if it can deliver.